


The Shore

by EntreNous



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Dark, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Wolfram & Hart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-02-28
Updated: 2005-02-28
Packaged: 2017-11-26 21:11:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EntreNous/pseuds/EntreNous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eve had grown up on The Shore.  She’d thought it was a real place at the time, but it turned out that was just a trick of light.  Well, that and a trick of interstices separating dimensions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shore

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the picfor1000 challenge (3rd time's the charm) based on [this picture of three pinwheels](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v218/EntreNous/random/4372af2d.bmp).

The most annoying question during Eve’s ten days of freshman orientation at Santa Cruz was that repeated, banal inquiry: _Where are you from?_

She tried to distract her hallmates from the fact that she _had_ no answer. But they found it odd, and thought her strange. During a time when everyone poorly masked their desperate panic to belong, they assumed she wanted to set herself apart. But why should she be alone just because she didn’t have a childhood in a specific location? 

Eve had grown up on The Shore. She’d thought it was a real place at the time, but it turned out that was just a trick of light. Well, that and a trick of interstices separating dimensions.

“None of this is real, you know,” one of the Uncles said to her once. The Uncles and Aunts were adults who visited the children. Eight children: sometimes some of them were boys, sometimes girls, and sometimes they were all one or the other. But the Uncles and Aunts were _always_ one or the other. And unlike the children with their bright outfits, they always wore the same thing: gray or black wool that covered color. 

“None of what is real?” Eve had asked. The order of the day was Summer, and so she wore a frilled skirted bathing suit and carried an amethyst colored plastic pail and shovel. There had been Summer Frolics, and Summer Foods, and their challenges all centered on the peculiar guiles and fears of that season.

“None of _this_ ,” the Uncle emphasized irritably. He gestured at the horizon, at the blinding white sand, and the warm blue sky. “It’s just a modality, a place to put all of you while they train you and then weed you down to one.”

“It’s real,” Eve assured him. She gestured at the sand, at the wisps of white clouds breezing past the sun above them, but he only shook his head. 

“The Shore is in a building in a corporate park,” he told her, and she twisted her mouth into fish lips while she wondered what “corporate” and “park” meant. She knew what a building was, though, and so she stared around her, tried to picture an ocean and coast fitting into that kind of structure. 

“It must be a wonderful building,” she said, and to her surprise he laughed out loud.

“You’re a funny one,” he told her.

That word “one” tripped something in her head, a little spark reminding her that they were playing a game. The Uncles and Aunts gave them lots of puzzles to figure out important messages. “Down to one,” she said quietly, recalling his words of a moment before. 

“It’s going to be just one of us?” Eve asked more loudly as the man cupped fingers above his eyes, shading them from the glare of the sea that no one ever quite reached. 

She had supposed that it wouldn’t always be eight of them. In fact, it had recently become six. When the order of the day was Spring, there had been six baskets filled with fragrant grass holding baby chicks, and six children to coo and poke at the cheeping birds. Where the other two children had gone to was anyone’s guess, though no one did guess. 

But she had never thought it would be down to one. Two made sense. One for fetching and one for carrying. One for coming and one for going. “Two is company,” she said to the man. 

“And three is a crowd,” he answered finally, and pointed at something that hadn’t been there before. 

Stuck into the sand were three white sticks topped with what looked like folded ribbons. Not the shiny kind they put in their hair when they were girls and the order of the day was Celebration, but dull colored, even in the light that glinted off of their twists and turns.

“I don’t know what to call them,” she told him.

“You might not have to call them anything,” he replied.

Just like that, she knew that they would go from six to three children today. Three little stars on sticks in a row: red, yellow, blue. She walked closer to them, and then sat down on the sand while she thought about this puzzle.

If The Shore was in a building, then the orders of the days fit into a structure. And if there was a way she could structure her memories, it was by the time when there had been More Than Enough. Glimpses fluttered through her mind: a sea of teddy bears, enough blankets and pillows to bed an army of children, always more trains or easels or jigsaw puzzles than them.

But the days came of Just Enough. Just enough dolls for holding when they cried themselves to sleep, just enough servings of food to sate them, just enough warmth in the fading sunlight, but not a smidgen more. 

And now was no longer Just Enough. It was Not Enough. That was what the Six baskets of soft yellow fluff had meant. That was where the Three flowery curled colored tops on white sticks fit in. And later, there would be One Thing, enough for only One of them. 

She scrunched her toes down into the sand, digging with them past the top layer of hot grains down into the cool damp below. “Only enough for three, and later one?” she asked him. 

“Yes,” he said. His eyes flickered over her. 

“Then that one will be me,” Eve said with grave finality. 

He laughed and straightened, brushing sand off of his pinstriped knees. “Well, we’ll have to see about that.” 

She watched him walk away towards the group of the others, Uncles and Aunts and the five children who would not be the One.

But just to make sure, she ran to collect the white straws and their dull colored tops, letting one spin in the breeze in her hand while she crushed the other two underfoot.


End file.
